Caves of Qud is a science fantasy roguelike epic steeped in retrofuturism, deep simulation, and swathes of sentient plants. Come inhabit an exotic world and chisel through layers of thousand-year-old civilizations. Decide: is it a dying earth, or is it on the verge of rebirth?
You arrive at the oasis-hamlet of Joppa, along the far rim of Moghra'yi, the Great Salt Desert. All around you, moisture farmers tend to groves of viridian watervine. There are huts wrought from rock salt and brinestalk. On the horizon, Qud's jungles strangle chrome steeples and rusted archways to the earth. Further and beyond, the fabled Spindle rises above the fray and pierces the cloud-ribboned sky.
You clutch your rifle, or your vibroblade, or your tattered scroll, or your poisonous stinger, or your hypnotized goat. You approach a watervine farmer—he lifts the brim of his straw hat and says, "Live and drink, friend."
Who are you?
Play the role of a mutant indigenous to the salt-spangled dunes and jungles of Qud, or play a pure-strain descendant from one of the few remaining eco-domes—the toxic arboreta of Ekuemekiyye, the Holy City; the ice-sheathed arcology of Ibul; or the crustal mortars of Yawningmoon.You arrive at the oasis-hamlet of Joppa, along the far rim of Moghra'yi, the Great Salt Desert. All around you, moisture farmers tend to groves of viridian watervine. There are huts wrought from rock salt and brinestalk. On the horizon, Qud's jungles strangle chrome steeples and rusted archways to the earth. Further and beyond, the fabled Spindle rises above the fray and pierces the cloud-ribboned sky.
You clutch your rifle, or your vibroblade, or your tattered scroll, or your poisonous stinger, or your hypnotized goat. You approach a watervine farmer—he lifts the brim of his straw hat and says, "Live and drink, friend."
What can you do?
Anything and everything. Caves of Qud is a deeply simulated, biologically diverse, richly cultured world.- Assemble your character from over 70 mutations and defects and 24 castes and kits—outfit yourself with wings, two heads, quills, four arms, flaming hands, or the power to clone yourself—it's all the character diversity you could want.
- Explore procedurally-generated regions with some familiar locations—each world is nearly 1 million maps large.
- Dig through everything—don't like the wall blocking your way? Dig through it with a pickaxe, or eat through it with your corrosive gas mutation, or melt it to lava. Yes, every wall has a melting point.
- Hack the limbs off monsters—every monster and NPC is as fully simulated as the player. That means they have levels, skills, equipment, faction allegiances, and body parts. So if you have a mutation that lets you, say, psionically dominate a spider, you can traipse through the world as a spider, laying webs and eating things.
- Pursue allegiances with over 60 factions—apes, crabs, robots, and highly entropic beings—just to name a few.
- Follow the plot to Barathrum the Old, a sentient cave bear who leads a sect of tinkers intent on restoring technological splendor to Qud.
- Learn the lore—there's a story in every nook, from legendary items with storied pasts to in-game history books written by plant historians.
- Die—Caves of Qud is brutally difficult and deaths are permanent. Don't worry, though—you can always roll a new character.
Caves of Qud
Freehold GamesDeveloper
Freehold GamesPublisher
2015-07-15Release
🎹🖱️ Keyboard + Mouse
Overwhelmingly Positive (10025 reviews)
VR Support
Public Linux Depots:
- Caves of Qud - Linux [214.01 M]
Available DLCs:
- Caves of Qud - Pet Pack 1
Surprise Feature Friday - August 8, 2025
210.23\n
- \n
- Phase spiders are now more reliably phased.\n
- Dream wrens found outside of Chavvah are now part of the birds faction.\n
- You now always start with a method of seeing in the dark when entering a waking dream.\n
- Waking dreams now wait until you return to the main gameplay screen to end, so for example your dream does not end in the middle of a conversation.\n
- Juking now counts as movement for the cooling effects of blaze tonic.\n
- Burgeoning and Temporal Fugue no longer play the gain follower sound effect for each summoned creature.\n
- You now only ask the wild-eyed water merchant about Mamon Souldrinker if you have Raising Indrix.\n
- The game now recognizes ciderer Erah as a proper noun.\n
- The Barathrumites are now called [redacted] if you get [redacted] in [redacted].\n
- The flowers in [redacted] are no longer flammable.\n
- Quest objects are now more consistently reachable.\n
- Tents made out of creature skins should be improperly capitalized less often.\n
- Removed an outdated section in the help files about different melee weapon types having different penetration values.\n
- Fixed a bug that allowed Fix-It spray foam to repair permanently broken objects.\n
- Fixed a bug that caused waydroids in adjacent zones to be hostile even if you had a droid scrambler.\n
- Fixed a bug that caused adjacent scrambled waydroids to count as hostile for the purpose of calculating wildfire for missile weapons.\n
- Fixed a bug that prevented item-based quest steps from completing when you obtained the item via tinkering.\n
- Fixed a bug that caused interactable quest objects to sometimes spawn in cells with other furniture, rendering them hard to see or interact with.\n
- Fixed a bug that caused nocturnal apex durations to be half as long as intended.\n
- Fixed lots of misspellings and other errors in generated text.\n
- Fixed lots of misspellings and other errors in non-generated text.\n
- Fixed a pronoun issue with Asphodel.\n
- [modding] Skills marked as ExcludeFromPool are now excluded from warm static rolls.\n
- [modding] Attempting to register for string events on XRLGame or using a handler other than IPart and Effect now outputs a warning.\n
- [modding] A GenericCommandEvent can now be queued for next action manager segment using GameEventCommand.\n
- [modding] A map of mod \"Exclusions\" can now be defined in manifest.json directories, skipping the directory if any of the listed mods is active.\n
- [modding] The DroppedEvent now has a static Send method.\n
- [modding] Fixed a bug that caused AwardingXPEvent to only propagate to game systems.\n
[ 2025-08-08 23:33:48 CET ] [Original Post]
Minimum Setup
- OS: Ubuntu 20.04. Ubuntu 18.04. and CentOS 7
- Processor: 1GHz or faster. SSE2 instruction set support.Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Graphics card: OpenGL 3.2+. Vulkan capable
- Storage: 2 GB available space
GAMEBILLET
[ 6367 ]
FANATICAL
[ 5899 ]
GAMERSGATE
[ 1587 ]
MacGameStore
[ 2438 ]
INDIEGALA
[ 482 ]
FANATICAL BUNDLES
Time left:
356098 days, 14 hours, 42 minutes
Time left:
356098 days, 14 hours, 42 minutes
Time left:
2 days, 22 hours, 42 minutes
Time left:
30 days, 22 hours, 42 minutes
Time left:
33 days, 22 hours, 42 minutes
Time left:
34 days, 22 hours, 42 minutes
GMG BUNDLES
Time left:
8 days, 8 hours, 42 minutes
HUMBLE BUNDLES
Time left:
3 days, 16 hours, 42 minutes
Time left:
9 days, 16 hours, 42 minutes
Time left:
10 days, 16 hours, 42 minutes
Time left:
15 days, 16 hours, 42 minutes
Time left:
17 days, 16 hours, 42 minutes
Time left:
21 days, 16 hours, 42 minutes
INDIEGALA BUNDLES
Time left:
1 days, 5 hours, 43 minutes
Time left:
5 days, 22 hours, 43 minutes
Time left:
7 days, 21 hours, 43 minutes
Time left:
13 days, 4 hours, 53 minutes
by buying games/dlcs from affiliate links you are supporting tuxDB
